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on Monday February 10, 2014 @07:01PM
from the shiny-new-toys dept.

goruka writes with news that a new game engine has been made available to Free Software developers under the permissive MIT license "Godot is a fully featured, open source, MIT licensed, game engine. It focuses on having great tools, and a visual oriented workflow that can deploy to PC, Mobile and Web platforms with no hassle. The editor, language and APIs are feature rich, yet simple to learn. Godot was born as an in-house engine, and was used to publish several work-for-hire commercial titles. With more than half a million lines of code, Godot is one of the most complex Open Source game engines at the moment, and one of the largest commitments to open source software in recent years. It allows developers to make games under Linux (and other unix variants), Windows and OSX."
The source is available via Github, and, according to Phoronix, it's about as featureful as the Unity engine.

I gave a shot at your youtube link and I have to say, I would rather try to return a laser printer without a receipt at Best Buy in the days following Black Friday than watch one more minute of that horrible sitcom. It makes Three's Company look like a complex plot-driven drama starring top models...

Also: why did they hire trannies to play female characters? Must be a British thing.

None of those are nearly as complex or featured as Godot. Also, they were designed for hardware architectures not relevant any more today.
Godot tries to avoid the same mistake by abstracting the graphics part as higher level, so changes in hardware trends don't affect the rest of the engine as much.

After having a look over the doco for Godot, I'd say that CrystalSpace isn't as far behind as you'd think (especially if you include CEL). However, Godot seems to have more nice features if you're actually developing a game (nice UI, publishing integration).

CS suffers from being more of a programmer's playground than a practical game engine and having quite a steep learning curve, but I've been toying with it for more than a decade.

Also, they were designed for hardware architectures not relevant any more today.

This hits closer to the mark - CS was started a long time ago, but it's ende

They still exist, but are often used for student projects and tech demos. Building the game engine and the associated tech demos to show it off is the (relatively) easy part. Creating a decent game with proper art assets, animation, music, voice actors, level design and a good storyline with well-developed characters is the hard part. It requires a lot more effort than collaboratively building application middleware and many studios prefer to use proven commercial engines like UE, iD tech, CryEngine, Source, etc... that are artifacts of actually building a commercial game rather than building just an engine.

I'm not saying these things are essential for all games but often for notable ones and in the case of simple games it is often not worth the effort to learn/use an engine that has so many features you aren't going to need.

Does a fame engine do anything useful outside SEO? I don't want to be famous on just the internet you know. Sure, the internet has a very large demographics, and it's international, but everything feels so virtual. And being "virtually famous" doesn't make me look good.

This is an easy answer, STL is good but often not as good, specially for projects this size and requirements because:

1- It generates huge debugging symbols.
2- It generates a lot of code because most compilers inline it by default.
3- It's so complex that compile time increases by a few times.
4- Errors are huge and uncomprehensible.
5- Support for custom allocators is limited to alloc/dealloc functions.
6- Support across compilers is not as good (specially console compilers).
7- Lack of support for COW with atomic ops for thread safety

Some of these probably improved significantly since the time work on the engine started, but I'm sure most issues still stand.

As for why not std::string or std::wstring, have you actually used those? They suck, the amount of operations you can do is really little, check core/ustring.h in Godot to std::string and you'll easily see why everyone rewrites the string class.

The first thing I noticed is that the string class wasn't well thought out at all.

In particular, while it is already generally considered among experienced C++ programmers to be unsafe to derive a class from another that does not have a virtual destructor (a rule that the godot author(s) seem to have violated by inheriting their custom string class from their vector class), when the base class does not contain any virtual members at all, and the base class is still intended to be a general utility class, then inheritance is almost always the wrong tool for the job. The proper tool, in this case, would probably have been to use containment, and not inheritance... or if inheritance was really to have been the way to go, then it should have been derived from a base class that was common to both itself and Vector, where the necessary base class is never directly used by anyone other than those classes, (with all of its constructors declared protected, including the copy constructor, so that it is not possible to use the class unsafely outside of those controlled contexts).

I can think of absolutely no good reason to ever inherit from a class that has absolutely no virtual functions when the base class is one of general utility, and may be utilized by callers.

Thanks for the preaching, but I don't know what an "experienced C++ programmer" is. There are several different ways people programs C++, including different styles and different purposes.

Clean code is useless when it doesn't perform as expected, and performant code is useless when it's more difficult to write. C++ is meant to mix both things, so by definition it will never be entirely clean or performant. It's a language that strikes the right balance for this specific purpose.

There's no problem with not having a virtual destructor. Of course one may often wish to avoid virtual functions for performance reasons, The problem is inheriting fom such a class when the base class is also a general utility class. It is incredibly unsafe, and almost always logically wrong. It is usually n indication of overeagerness on the part of the programmer to utilize inheritance as a code reuse measure. Ther is no problem code reuse by itself, but how this implement or chose to accomplish. It i

By the way, if containment were used, the necessary public functions and operators would just be implemented as single line inline (or even forced intline) functions that delegated their responsibility to the contained class... this would incur no performance or memory overhead above inheritance,, and in particular, you make both the general purrpose vector class and string class completely safe to use in all contexts...where otherwise there is the distinct chance of errors cropping up when a reference to

Fair assessment... I was kind of pressed for time when I wrote that, but there was still a lot I wanted to say... my brain was firing so much faster than my fingers that what I was saying didn't come out particularly as well as I had intended.

STL strings used to have CoW, until they realised that performance dies horribly with such a thin on multi-threaded applications. The memory cost of copying the string data (nowadays) is much less than blocking the CPU with a context switch every time you want to copy or modify a string.

There's no reason to worry about compatibility - use STLPort and you're good to go; or use uSTL and you're good even on really crappy hardware (which kind of defeats the point, if you're using really crappy hardware 80% of y

The tech has now proven to be quite mature and is now very complete and according to its developer to be on-par with Unity, or arguably superior to Unity when it comes to the area of 2D and animation support.

Phoronix was just repeating the developer's claim. Would anybody who isn't the engine's developer care to comment on its feature parity with Unity?

Honestly, i wish Godot the best of luck with their engine.But comparing anything to Unity is just telling me it may be "easy" to use, but the performance will never exist.

I'am yet to play any Unity game that doesn't make my PC feel like its 10 years old. It annoys me when i see a Unity logo on any game, as i know what to expect.If Developers spent a little more time using a pure IDE based engine, the current indie games market would promote excellence, rather than cheap physx titles running on some hashed j

What on earth is a "pure IDE based engine"? And what do you mean by "hashed job Java code"? Unity has Unityscript (which is like Javascript) and Boo (which is a little like Python), but I'd guess that most games are written in C#. And what does the language matter anyway?